The appeal of sex, vice and a videogame

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas last week "became Britain's fastest-selling videogame", announced the Sun. "It made £35m from 1m sales in nine days." The Times noted that its first-week gross surpassed cinema records, "beating the British record box-office receipts generated by Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban". In the US, it is "estimated to sell around 5m copies before the year's end", said the New York Post.

The success of the fifth in Edinburgh-based Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series, for PlayStation 2, was a reminder that "a little sex mixed with plenty of violence does your sales figures no harm at all," said Matthew Magee in the Scotsman.

This is no Space Invaders, no Pacman. "As a car-bound criminal in the game, your job is to build a criminal empire. One way to gather cash is to hire a prostitute, pay for sexual favours and then kill the woman, taking her earnings." Indeed, it is "jam-packed with the sort of aggressive, violent, antisocial shenanigans that keep our jails packed to capacity", said the NY Post. No surprise, then, that the game also sports an 18 certificate.

Yet any outcry is relatively muted. "GTA's depiction of sex and crime and all things grimey sparked moral outrage in its day, but these days everyone is chasing Rockstar's tail in the bid to release the steamiest, most grown-up games on the block," said Magee.

The size of the industry might come as a surprise to those whose last videogame excursion involved gobbling dots and dodging ghosts. Estimates of global videogame profits range from $10bn to $30bn (£5.5bn-£16bn), noted Gloria Goodale in the US- based Christian Science Monitor, and "as the demographic ages (players include those in their 20s and 30s) and the industry begins to beat movies' box office, pundits say it's time to acknowledge a cultural change at work."

But it isn't - is it - art? Over to Steven Poole in Glasgow's Sunday Herald. "We can't say that GTA: San Andreas is the videogame equivalent of Battleship Potemkin," he said, "but, in its anarchic breadth and sophistication, it's another signpost on the road to a very interesting future."